Medium Launches TK App as Google Referrals Slide

On Nov. 9, Medium launched TK, a free writing and note-taking app for anyone with a Medium account — a direct response to losing Google referral traffic, which historically supplied 44 percent of the platform's visitors. The move matters because Medium's CEO says search decline threatens not just his company but writers who depend on it.

TK ships with an AI assistant built into the editor. Typing @TK calls up a tool that answers questions, finds saved paragraphs, gives headline and editorial feedback, compares drafts against Medium publications' style guides, and pulls related notes into summaries that link back to the originals. It also supports small-group sharing through features called Libraries, where members can comment, swap notes, or contribute writing of their own.

What does the traffic shift actually look like?

CEO Tony Stubblebine told The Verge that referrals declined "when Google started taking away all the traffic," and he framed the stakes bluntly: "this hurts us, but it also hurts you." The backdrop is measurable. Pew Research Center's analysis of March 2025 browsing data found users clicked a traditional search result on 8 percent of Google visits featuring an AI summary, versus 15 percent of visits without one.

His strategic answer is distribution that bypasses search entirely. "We're just going to take everything underground," Stubblebine told The Verge, meaning drafts shared directly inside private groups rather than published into an algorithm-fed feed. Medium has been profitable since 2024, but faces pressure from both Substack and social platforms.

How does the AI piece work?

The name is an editor's in-joke: "TK" marks something in a draft still to come. The app lets writers import their Medium archives or bring over notes from Bear and Obsidian, and an optional Claude integration on GitHub lets an outside AI agent (an autonomous assistant that can act on the notebook) work with the content.

Stubblebine's stated goals: "We've designed TK for three goals: Easy to write. Easy to think. Easy to feel like your writing matters." He describes the split between the apps as "TK is the gym and Medium is the stage" — private drafting and thinking happen in TK, public publishing stays on Medium.

The company positions the AI as a collaborator, not a ghostwriter. TK lets writers disclose which material came from AI and show the prompts and source material behind it. Stubblebine wrote in the announcement: "Much of the AI industry is betting that machines will do our thinking for us... We're not anti-AI, we're pro-human — and that's why we built TK."

What does this change for writers?

For practitioners, TK offers a free private workspace with early feedback loops, plus a path from rough notes to publication. Libraries cover journaling, draft feedback, and working toward a self-published book. A draft can stay private, reach a handful of readers, or eventually publish to Medium's platform.

The competitive context is real. Substack already turns podcast recordings into editable transcripts, suggests short video clips for Notes or Instagram, and offers readers a "Scan for AI text" option powered by Pangram that estimates how much of a post is human-written, AI-generated, or AI-assisted.

The tension Medium hasn't resolved: putting AI a few keystrokes from every unfinished sentence while urging people to write more themselves. In a 2026 survey Medium conducted with The Harris Poll, 71 percent of writers said they'd used AI in their writing process in the previous three months — yet 69 percent said they distrusted AI-assisted writing from others. TK could accelerate both outcomes at once.

Stubblebine's stated ambition — writing that "compounds into deep thinking, which creates influence across your entire world" — will be tested by whether private groups and AI feedback produce better drafts, or just more of them.